Tales of Time and Space

by Allen Steele

  Thus they decided, then and there, to invent a more believable explanation for the disappearances of William Russell and Arleigh Renwick. During a beachside picnic, Mr. Renwick decided to go for a swim, but he went too far out from shore and was caught in a riptide. Mr. Russell swam in to rescue him, but he suffered the same fate as well. Both were swept out to sea, never to be seen again.

  I refused to go along with this at first, until I was told, in no uncertain terms, that if I attempted to reveal the truth, the others would disavow me. Furthermore, they would claim that I’d murdered both Mr. Russell and Mr. Renwick, weighting their bodies with heavy rocks and casting them into the ocean, and then come up with this outlandish tale as an attempt to cover my crime. In the end, it would be my word against theirs; if I didn’t end up in the electric chair, then I’d spend the rest of my life in an insane asylum.

  I had little choice but to go along with them. Truth to be told, I was angered by Mr. Russell’s cowardice, at the way he’d been willing to sacrifice my life to save his own. The lie made him seem more heroic than he actually was. On the other hand, the truth was something none of us were ready to admit, even to ourselves. So while I didn’t argue very long or hard with Mr. Russell’s friends, I privately vowed never to trust any of them again.

  As it turned out, they couldn’t be trusted even amongst themselves, because one of the five apparently did speak with someone in authority. Only a day after the tragic story of Mr. Russell’s and Mr. Renwick’s untimely deaths appeared in the newspapers, I was paid an unexpected visit.

  I was still on Jekyll Island, packing up Mr. Russell’s belongings, when two men appeared at the cottage’s front door. Although they wore civilian clothes, they produced credentials identifying themselves as belonging to U.S. Army intelligence, whereupon they let me know that they knew what had really happened two days earlier. They spent the afternoon interviewing me, and once they had my side of the story, they made me an offer that I dared not refuse.

  The island has been my home ever since.

  The Jekyll Island Club closed during World War II. By then, Betty and I had gotten married, and for a few years we worked as the club’s custodians, taking care of its shuttered and unvisited buildings. But the club didn’t reopen after the war, and eventually the property was purchased by the state of Georgia, with the nearby cottages either sold or simply abandoned. Indeed, once Mrs. Russell inherited her husband’s estate, one of the first things she did was sell Riverside. She retained ownership of her late husband’s publishing company, but eventually Apollo Publications went bankrupt, killed by the wartime paper shortage and the changing tastes of the public. The last I heard of her, she was still living off William A. Russell’s money, her Gramercy Park townhouse lined with bottles and boys.16

  I still write on occasion, although my ambitions to become a noted author are a thing of the past. For a time, I contributed stories to a variety of science fiction magazines; all were published under a pseudonym,17 though, and none allude to that terrible day. This is the first and last time I’ll ever write about what I saw. I intend for it to remain locked in my file cabinet until my death, when it’ll pass to my heirs. Perhaps then my son George, who is still only a teenager, will decide one day to let it become public. For his own sake, though, I hope that he will wait until such a time comes when he believes disclosure will be in world’s best interests.

  For the most part, I abide by my agreement with the government. Every month, I receive a generous check from Uncle Sam that allows me to live in reasonable comfort. In return, I keep quiet about what I witnessed. And every day, I visit the ocean, where I look for any indications that the creature may have returned.

  I don’t know where it came from, or why it was here, or where it has gone. Only William A. Russell ever learned these things. The creature must have had its reasons for taking him, and the possibilities of what they were are what keep me up at night. In my nightmares, I still hear him screaming.

  The creature has never returned. Nonetheless, I’m afraid that it may come back one day, and that it may not come alone.

  9 The manuscript wasn’t dated, but judging from this remark, I believe that it was written in 1954.

  10 During the 1930s, Apollo Publications was the second-largest publisher of pulp fiction, rivaled only by Street & Smith.

  11 This is true. According to Arthur Thomas’s biography of William Apollo Russell, American Pulp (Prentice-Hall, 1983), he legally changed his name from Werner Aaron Rabinowitz in 1919, shortly after his father’s death.

  12 Hess is being discrete here, but Russell’s biography tells the whole story. In December, 1933, a New York judge ordered Edith Russell to six months in a Connecticut sanitarium, where she underwent treatment for alcoholism and nymphomania. This court-mandated stay, of course, was arranged by her husband.

  13 The Jekyll Island Club participated in the first transcontinental “party line” phone conversation, in a ceremony held on January 15, 1915, that included President Woodrow Wilson phoning in from the White House, Alexander Graham Bell calling from New York, his assistant Thomas Watson talking in San Francisco, and William Rockefeller speaking to everyone from the clubhouse.

  14 It appears Hess was trying to describe a biomechanism, but lacked the modern-day terminology for it.

  15 A reference to a secret conference held at the Jekyll Island Club in 1910, when a small group of members, along with Rhode Island Senator Nelson Aldrich and several economic experts, met to plan the restructure of the American banking system. The Federal Reserve System was the result of this meeting.

  16 Edith Russell died in New York in 1959.

  17 I’ve attempted to learn the pseudonym Solomon Hess used, yet this information isn’t available in any of the standard literary references.

  Another counterfactual tale, this one more far-fetched than the last, but also with a seed of truth at its core. Dr. Goddard’s space train is based on two things: the illustration that accompanied the Worcester Gazette story mentioned herein, and a late 1950’s proposal for a lunar lander by astronautical designer Kraft Ericke, who came up with dozens of fascinating spacecraft, although so far as I know none of them actually flew.

  When my friends Tom Easton and Judith Klein-Dial asked me to contribute something to their anthology Impossible Futures, I knew at once that I had to give them a story about a space train. Here it is…and anyone who tries to nitpick it for “scientific accuracy” needs to get a clue.

  LOCOMOTIVE JOE AND THE WRECK OF SPACE TRAIN No. 4

  The space trains are gone now, of course. The wreck of the No. 4 did them in, way back in ’39. Since then it’s been step-rockets and spaceplanes, which everyone agrees are safer and more reliable, although perhaps not as much fun. But whenever the guys who used to work the trains get together—not so often these days; there’s only a few of us left—we talk about the good old days when we’d fly these things to the Moon. And inevitably, we tell the story of Locomotive Joe and how he saved the lives of everyone aboard the Tycho Express.

  I was a conductor aboard the No. 4, so I was there when it happened. That’s important, because the story has been embellished so many times over the years that the truth is now buried beneath the legend. And I knew Joe Welch, of course. His nickname didn’t come ’til later, and that’s part of the legend, too. Everyone considers him to be a hero, and I suppose he was; who am I to argue? But I can tell you with absolute certainty that courage and bravery were only part of the story. There was something else, too.

  Young people today don’t know much about the space trains. Those things belonged to their grandparents’ and great-grandparents’ time, and so what little they’ve learned about them generally comes from old movies, and sometimes not a lot even then. So I’m going to have to assume that things have to be explained to you if you’re younger than…oh, say, 70…and ask that you be patient with an old codger like me.

  (It’s called knowledge, kids, not infodumps. Explanations used to b
e respected. Then computers came along and reduced everyone’s attention span to that a puppy. Let’s see if you’re smarter than an eight-month-old terrier with a tennis ball. Sit down and shut up and let an old man talk.)

  Anyway…the space trains were the first passenger-carrying spacecraft, the ones built by the Goddard Rocket Company back in the ’30s. Almost as soon as Bob Goddard launched his first liquid-fuel contraption from his Aunt Effie’s farm in Massachusetts, people started clamoring for rocketships that would carry them into space. When the Worcester Telegram published a front page story saying that rockets would be carrying people to the Moon within ten years, Dr. Goddard suddenly began getting offers from investors who wanted to put money into this, and never mind the fact that the Telegram story was total horse poop. But ol’ Doc knew a good buck when he saw it, so once he patented his work and raised investment capital from his pals Slim Lindbergh and Harry Guggenheim, he moved from Mass to New Mexico and started the Goddard Rocket Company.

  From the get-go, it was Dr. Goddard’s idea that a rocket’s engine should be placed forward, not aft, of the payload. Cars do it, planes do it; why not spaceships, too? Some people think he got the notion from the illustration that accompanied the Worcester newspaper story, which itself bore a certain similarity to a picture in the original French edition of Jules Verne’s From the Earth to the Moon. But it doesn’t matter. Rocket up front, passenger compartment dragged behind it; that was the way the Lord and Robert Goddard intended.

  Further study showed, though, that this design was inadequate for achieving escape velocity. So Doc had to…well, let’s say borrow…an idea from the Germans, who were also beginning to do the same sort of thing, and build a big booster rocket that would act as a first stage. The booster wouldn’t make the whole trip, of course. It would be ditched as soon as the ship penetrated the atmosphere. But it got the rest of the ship off the ground, and that’s what the Goddard Rocket Company ended up building.

  No. 1, aka the Comet, was launched from Roswell in 1933. It wasn’t very large and carried only four people: Doctor G, his wife Esther, Harry Guggenheim, and their pilot, Charlie Lindbergh himself. But it made big screaming headlines after it circled the earth a couple of times and came back safe and sound, and that meant the money started pouring in from those still well-heeled enough after the stock market crash to afford a joyride into space. Once they had a few more million dollars to play with, the Goddard Rocket Company scaled-up the Comet design and proceeded to build its space trains.

  The Tycho Express was the fourth one built, and it was a monster: two hundred feet tall on its launch stand, with a massive first-stage booster capable of sending the locomotive and its 22,000-pound Pullman car into orbit. Once the booster was dropped into the Gulf of Mexico, the passenger car would be extended back from the locomotive upon four 1,000-foot tow cables, then the big gasoline and liquid oxygen engine would fire, and the whole thing would be on its way to the Moon. The engine would ignite again every now and then to correct its course, but most of the time the train would coast along on its own momentum, the crew and passengers enjoying zero-gravity weightlessness. About two and a half days later, it would swing around the Moon, letting everyone aboard get a good look at all the green cheese down there—just kidding; they never saw anything except rock and sand—then the locomotive would fire up again and the train would return home. Once it reached Earth, the car would be detached from the locomotive, fire retro-rockets, enter the atmosphere tail-first, open its parachutes, and splash down just off the Atlantic coast, where a steamship would pick it up and carry the passengers to New York. The locomotive would break up when it made an uncontrolled re-entry, and probably kill a whale or two when its remains crashed in the ocean, but that was okay; the rockets were cheap and the company could always make more.

  The trains carried ten people: four crewmembers—a pilot, a copilot, an engineer, and a conductor—and six passengers. I was recruited by the company in ’38. I was only 21 at the time, but my family had been working the rails for three generations, and I’d been a Pullman conductor since I was 17. The company needed experienced railroad men to take care of their customers and I wanted to go to the Moon, so we were a natural fit for each other. Six months training, including a couple of orbital flights on ol’ No. 1, and then they put me on No. 4, the Tycho Express.

  The train had a good crew. Floyd Simmons was a great pilot and Rich Sneed a terrific second officer, but our engineer, Joe Welch, was the one who stood out. Joe knew the ship backward and forward; there wasn’t a rivet he was unfamiliar with, and I swear he could have taken the locomotive apart and put it back together without checking the blueprints. But that wasn’t all. Joe was frustrated that the space trains weren’t designed to actually land on the Moon. No one had done that yet, and it made him mad that the company had very little interest in doing so. So even though the Tycho Express would come within sixty miles of the lunar surface, all he could do was peer out the window and watch longingly as the mountains and craters swept by, so close and yet so far.

  Me, I was too busy. Looking after six people—six very rich people at that—for five days was hard work. The easy part was getting them safely strapped into their couches just before take-off and cleaning up after them when they inevitably threw up after we reached orbit. Once the train was in zero gravity, you’d have to teach the simplest things—how to get out of bed, use the toilet, get dressed, eat, so on and so forth—and assist them if they couldn’t or wouldn’t learn. There were three double-occupancy staterooms on the car’s lower deck, so I had to clean them every day, including changing the hammock liners, putting away personal belongings before they floated away, and scrubbing the commodes. And there were always hassles. Unruly children. Fussy parents. Unmarried men who wanted to induct single women into the so-called 240,000 Mile Club (I didn’t mind, so long as they closed the door and didn’t make a lot of noise). The occasional idiot who wanted to smoke a pipe or fool around in the airlock. I have a theory about the rich: if you make more than a million dollars, the universe compensates by dropping your I.Q. fifty percent.

  There was never a problem, though, that I couldn’t handle. Or at least not until April 9, 1939, the day the Goddard Rocket Company had its first—and last—major accident.

  That morning, the Tycho Express took off from its launch depot. It was the train’s sixth trip to the Moon, my fourth as its conductor. The first part of the flight was business as usual. After it dropped the booster in the drink, the locomotive lowered the car, then fired the main engine; it shut down about ninety seconds later, once the train reached low orbit. A quick swing around the planet so that Floyd and Rich could make their final calculations and the passengers could get their first look at Earth from space (and finish losing their breakfast), then Floyd pointed the train toward the Moon and fired the main engine.

  That was how things usually went.

  What went wrong was that the engine didn’t shut down again.

  To this day, no one knows exactly why that happened. The instruments worked fine, there were no shorts in the wiring, and before you ask, no, there wasn’t any indication of human error. The best theory is that a valve stuck in the locomotive’s primary ignition chamber, causing the engine to keep firing even after the pilot sent a signal up the wire for the engine to shut down.

  We’ll probably never know for sure. Whatever the reason, it remains one of three unsolved mysteries behind the wreck of the No. 4.

  I realized we were in trouble when the train remained under thrust longer than it should have. I’d ridden the train enough times to know that there’s a distinct series of events that must occur during a successful flight, and if any of them doesn’t occur when it’s supposed to, it means that something is seriously screwed up. So when we still had 1-g in the car after the sixty-second period of the translunar engine burn, I unsnapped my seat harness and skedaddled up to the control room.

  Floyd, Rich, and Joe were all over the instrument panels wh
en I came in. No one was panicking—they were too well-trained for that—but they weren’t taking it lightly either. So I grabbed a safety rail and watched as they tried to correct the problem, until Floyd finally managed to engage the stand-by system and shut down the engine.

  By then, it was too late. The locomotive had been firing for just over three minutes, and thus our velocity was almost sixty percent higher than it should have been. That meant two things. First, the fuel reserve was depleted by nearly one-quarter; we’d reach the Moon, but we wouldn’t have enough fuel to get home. Second, our higher speed would cause us to reach our destination sooner than anticipated…and when Rich pulled out his slide ruler and ran the numbers, his recalculations showed us that the train would no longer slingshot around the Moon, but hit it straight on.

  Fortunately, this sort of accident had been anticipated. The operations manual laid out the abort procedure: uncouple the car from the locomotive, then use the retro-rockets to send it back to Earth for emergency re-entry. Floyd radioed back home to tell them what was going on, and he hit the switch that would detach the tow cables and release the car.

  And nothing happened.

  This is the second unsolved mystery: why did the release mechanism fail? A lot of people think that it can’t be a coincidence, and over the years I’ve heard quite a few conspiracy theories. Everyone from the Germans to rival space companies to alien invaders have been blamed. Personally, though, I don’t believe sabotage was involved. Bad luck happens sometimes, not just once but twice.